AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

Alex Schleber said...

Sadly, I have to agree with Robert's assessment here. And he's right that the tech conversation on FF has pretty much gone dead, although he has contributed to this through his own absence. If nothing else it shows how quickly the tides of conversation momentum can change.

What NO ONE is talking about is Twitter's persistence issue, and how FriendFeed is still pretty much the only solution to this problem:

Twitter is more or less actively withholding from you both your own tweets, as well as the tweets of your "with friends" following stream. Once it's passed by, and 7 days or so have passed, there is no way for you to get these tweets back out.

Now when it comes to the Twitter Firehose stream, that is somewhat understandable, since Twitter wants to sell it expensively to corporate data miners. But when it comes to your own stuff (including tweets from the people you may have spent a long time collecting into your "following"), you are out of luck. You can't even get it back by any kind of search natively (if you use Twitter Search, you will get the results mostly polluted by people you hadn't chosen to follow).

You probably wouldn't accept this from just about any other service that you are putting so much of your time and energy into. And none of the Twitter clients I've seen really resolve this issue, since they don't store the incoming tweets persistently (e.g. if TweetDeck crashes, the old stuff disappears, and is is generally not designed - yet - to create persistence/archiving).

Now FriendFeed has been the only relatively decent solution to this up to this point, except for the fact that it was overly hard to get ALL of one's following/friends imported (anyone not on FF already you have to import manually).

Robert has been getting some persistence (besides using FF) from using Twitter's much overlooked (b/c ill-designed) Favorites feature (along with Favestar.fm to collect them), and while his finds are much appreciated, this just isn't really practical for most. We can't all be monitoring the stream 24/7 like Robert is :)

What is much more useful is if you can search back over your Following's output ALL THE WAY BACK if necessary and see what they've said e.g. about the recent FTC vs. Bloggers brouhaha. Simple to do on FriendFeed, nearly impossible on Twitter.

Of course now we can't be sure if FF is going to be around long enough to continue to wholeheartedly recommend them as an option to solve this. I've never understood why the FF didn't play up this angle aggressively, they could have signed up tons of Twitter users on the archiving alone, and in due time people would have considered more of the other advantages of FF.